2007; 2008

In The Haunted Book and Le Monde des
montagnes, Camille Scherrer animates
the pages of books with an added
dynamic dimension. The setup appears
low-tech: a book, a laptop, and a familiar
desk lamp on a table. But a camera is
hidden inside the lamp, and when the
book’s pages are turned they display
a layer of virtual animation: a flock
of birds suddenly materializes in a stormy
sky, or a skeleton hand creeps across
the page. The Haunted Book is based
on a 19th-century gothic poem by
Thomas Hood; Le Monde des montagnes
is based on sayings from the Alpine region
of Switzerland where Scherrer grew
up. Scherrer made sure the reader
could focus on the experience without
being distracted by the technology;
the high-performance custom software
created by Julien Pilet of CVLAB, École
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne,
eliminated the need for visible, often
clunky augmented-reality markers, thus
doing away with a barrier between the
virtual and the real. Neither the book
nor the virtual dominate, reconciling the
traditionally conflicting worlds of paper
and screen and enabling them to enrich
each other.